LUL dude, I hear this shit being parroted ad-nauseum. The amount of FAANG people that hit this level or more is like, 5-10%. Take a look at the top 5-10% of non-FAANG companies and you'll see those employees are also hitting this mark. There's nothing special about FAANG. I understand lots of FAANG employees parrot this around to make themselves feel better about their life choices.
According to my experience (and again, that's the only thing I know), that's not even remotely true.
When I interviewed a couple years ago, I made sure to interview at FAANG (specifically Facebook, Google, Netflix) and I also interviewed at half dozen big public companies in the same couple months (among which Oracle, Salesforce, Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks). I didn't interview at any private company (Uber, AirBnB, ...), since I was coming out of the startup world and I wanted liquid compensation.
The FAANG offers that came back were all significantly higher than the other ones, and the constant was certainly me (a software engineer with 7 years of experience at the time and a BS + MS in Computer Engineering).
All the FAANG offers (luckily I got an offer from all the 3 I interviewed at) were at a total liquid compensation of $~400-450k/y (annualized cash + RSU), and I'm certainly not in the top 10% of their tech workforce, not even remotely close, I come in as a generalist with some ops experience who spent a couple months studying algorithms and data structures. I don't even have an active GitHub profile.
All the other non-FAANG tech companies (I got an offer from 4) were at a total liquid compensation of $~220k/y (annualized cash + RSU).
The only other companies who matched the FAANG offers were a couple of hedge funds on the East Coast, but I didn't want to relocate and I wanted to keep working for a tech company.
In the end, I joined Google.
So, I'm just reporting my own personal experience based on the data I directly experienced (I have PDFs of all the offers :-)). Feel free to ask any follow up question, I love educating software engineers on their real market value, since I think many sell themselves too short in this thriving market.
The stock value has slightly increased over the past year or so, and have received some refreshers. Very happy with the compensation part. I don't have kids and am looking for an early retirement outside the US, so I'm able to stash away significant amount of savings every month.
LUL dude, I hear this shit being parroted ad-nauseum. The amount of FAANG people that hit this level or more is like, 5-10%. Take a look at the top 5-10% of non-FAANG companies and you'll see those employees are also hitting this mark. There's nothing special about FAANG. I understand lots of FAANG employees parrot this around to make themselves feel better about their life choices.